President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all announced Thursday that two high-profile diplomats will serve as envoys to volatile regions, resolving the outstanding question about American foreign policy: Who will be in charge?

The answer: All of them.

Obama and Clinton appeared Thursday at the State Department to formally announce Clinton’s appointment and to roll out some of her senior staff and envoys. Among them was former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who, a source said, will report to both Obama and Secretary Clinton as Mideast envoy; Richard Holbrooke, envoy to South Asia and Afghanistan, will have a similar arrangement. The Mitchell appointment puts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the hands of an experienced power player and deal-maker, but leaves unresolved some of the lines of command in the new administration.

“It’s very rare for a Secretary of State this early in her tenure to subcontract an issue that’s so sexy and politically resonant to a person who could have been the Secretary of State,” said Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official and the author of "The Much too Promised Land," a study of American diplomacy in the Middle East. “If you do that to Holbrooke, if you do that to Mitchell — then the question is going to be asked, ‘Well, what are you doing?’” he said.

Those familiar with the arrangement have a straightforward answer to that concern: Clinton has learned from her predecessor’s mistakes. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the Middle East 17 times in her last two years, but saw even small, incremental steps toward peace wiped out by Israel’s recent invasion of Gaza.

“We’ve seen what happens when the secretary tries to be the desk officer on this issue,” said one person familiar with the plans.

"George is renowned, in this country and around the world, for his negotiating skill," Obama said. "He will be fully empowered at the negotiating table and he will sustain our focus on the goal of peace." Obama added that he favored a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The appointments add more powerful figures to the crowded room of American Middle East diplomacy. Along with Obama and Clinton, National Security Adviser James Jones has worked in the region, and a former envoy, Dennis Ross, is expected to take a senior State Department role. Holbrooke, a contender for Secretary of State himself, is a larger-than-life figure and major player.

And Vice President Joe Biden unexpectedly took the stage in Foggy Bottom yielding the podium back to Clinton, who in turn stressed that “the president and I” will be the key players.

Mitchell, in his own right, brings both dramatic change and a certain continuity. On the one hand, he’s a relative outsider — “not one of the peace processers,” Miller said.

But Mitchell does have his own deep experience in the region: President Bill Clinton appointed him in October of 2000 to head a commission to investigate the causes of what would become known as the Second Intifada — the renewed wave of violence at the end of his term that blossomed during Bush’s years into a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and construction of a wall around much of the West Bank. The Mitchell Report sharply criticized both sides, demanding that the Palestinian leadership disavow terrorism, and pressing Israel to put a halt to building and expanding “settlements” on disputed land.

“Whatever the source, violence will not solve the problems of the region. It will only make them worse. Death and destruction will not bring peace, but will deepen the hatred and harden the resolve on both sides,” said the report. “There is only one way to peace, justice, and security in the Middle East, and that is through negotiation.”

The report was delivered to the new Bush administration the next April, which essentially shelved it. But now Mitchell — a key player in negotiating a lasting peace in Northern Ireland — will have a chance to test his conclusions, and to pick up where the Clinton administration left off.

“It’s kind of cute that the very last appointment Clinton made was Mitchell, and this would be the first appointment she makes,” said Daniel Levy, a fellow at the New America Foundation.

The Mitchell Report’s focus on settlements comes as Israeli leaders are increasingly resigned to the notion that an Obama administration will push them to remove illegal settlements where Bush did not, but that portion of the report drew criticism from the American Jewish right as the appointment leaked out.

In an interview with Politico, Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman criticized Mitchell's stance of "neutrality." "The Swiss were neutral [in World War II]," he said. And the head of the Zionist Organization of America, Mort Klein, decried Mitchell as “overly sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs."

But many of those critics also viewed the Bush administration as soft on Israel — “Condoleezza Rice was at least as problematic as Mitchell, if not worse,” said Klein — and other pro-Israel figures described Mitchell as a staunch supporter of Israeli security.

“Senator Mitchell was a strong supporter of Israel in the Senate,” said a former legislative director for the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Doug Bloomfield, who added that in the Mitchell report, “each side was offended — so that means he must have done something right.”

“Danger and difficulty cannot cause the United States to turn away,” Mitchell said in his remarks today. “Peace and stability in the Middle East are in our national interest.”
The most glowing reviews of Mitchell’s appointment, though, came from Bush administration critics who had worried that Obama would rely on the usual diplomatic suspects and fall into familiar patterns.

“Mitchell is significant because he combines the three elements that have been missing since [former Secretary of State James] Baker,” said Miller. “Proven negotiating skills, fairness in understanding Arab and Israeli requirements, and stature as a senior pol.”